The Age of Geoeconomics
How the Logic of International Economics and Politics is Changing
Why are the world's major powers treating semiconductors as strategic assets, supply chains as vulnerabilities, and trade and investment as instruments of power? This book explains what changed, and what it means for those who lead companies and countries.
The economy has become too important to be left to economists
"Dependencies have become leverage. Interdependence is no longer treated as an unalloyed stabilizer. Instead, it is mapped as a lattice of potential pressure points. Who depends on whom, and for what, is now seen as a strategic variable, rather than a background condition."From The Age of Geoeconomics, chapter 1
For decades, the global economy ran on one expectation: markets would keep integrating, and interdependence would bring prosperity and cooperation. Governments stepped back and let efficiency decide where things were made, financed and sold.
That expectation is giving way to a new reality. Governments no longer simply benefit from interdependence; they shape it. At the heart of the change is a struggle over the balance of dependence: who depends on whom, for what, and with what consequences for power. States work to cut the dependencies that make them vulnerable while cultivating the ones that give them leverage over others. Trade, finance, technology, investment, energy and supply chains have become the arenas where this competition is fought.
The Age of Geoeconomics explains this transformation and gives leaders a framework for reading it. It shows how governments coerce rivals, hedge against vulnerabilities, bind partners more closely and drive wedges between competing coalitions, and how these strategies are producing what the authors call strategic capitalism: an order in which security, power and geopolitical position increasingly decide what markets alone used to decide.
What the book gives a leader
The balance of dependence
A new way to read the world economy. Not who trades most with whom, but who can walk away, who cannot, and what that asymmetry is worth in power.
Four geoeconomic strategies
Coercion, binding, wedging and hedging. How states convert economic ties into leverage, and how to recognise which one is being used on you.
Five forces remaking the economy
The digitalisation, decarbonisation, weaponisation, securitisation and balkanisation of the economy, each examined as a source of dependence and leverage. One chapter on each.
Strategic capitalism
The emerging order in which markets are shaped for security and advantage, not left to optimise efficiency. What it demands of governments, and what it demands of companies.
Praise for the book
Purely market-based economic globalization is receding, replaced by geoeconomics as the defining logic of the current geopolitical era. The Age of Geoeconomics provides an indispensable analytical toolbox for understanding, and wielding, the economic statecraft shaping today's world.
Governor, Bank of Finland
The Age of Geoeconomics is a sharp, essential guide for how power increasingly is wielded today, through markets, supply chains, economic leverage, and emerging technology.
Center for European Policy Analysis
A profound and timely reflection on the reconfiguration of global power. This book offers a clear and compelling framework for understanding how states leverage economic networks and dependencies, and for developing the strategic foresight needed in an age defined by interdependence.
Provost, IE University
Written from the front line of geoeconomic analysis
The book explains the new logic. ESF helps you act on it.
The Age of Geoeconomics sets out how economic power is now exercised. The Economic Security Forum turns that understanding into analysis, assessments and training for the executives and policymakers who have to make decisions inside this system, before the leverage is used against them.
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The book is published by Bloomsbury Academic and available in hardback, paperback and eBook from the retailers below.
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